


Her name

by enterprisecat



Series: Floating in Space [1]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Despair, Emotional Hurt, Gen, I want to see them interact, Nebula Needs a Hug as well, Nebula has feelings, One Shot, Open Ending, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark is a mechanic, quick mention of panic attacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-17 23:16:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18108506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enterprisecat/pseuds/enterprisecat
Summary: Fate is lauging at Tony - that one thing he dreaded the most, space, will be the place of his final rest or beautiful friendships have humble beginnings(a Tony & Nebula oneshot in space).





	Her name

_What is her name?_

It’s a stupid thought. Names are meaningless in the face of an imminent death, after all. Yet, Tony can’t stop wondering about it, can’t stop himself from thinking about this tiny, insignificant detail about the unknown alien woman.

Did she provide him with her name at all? Where there even time for that?

Everything seems like a blur – from the attack, up until the moment when Peter…

No. He can’t go there. Not now. Probably not ever, but definitely not now.

He looks on the woman again, his brain unconsciously turning on the “analyze mode”. He can’t tell for sure without taking a closer look, but it seems that most of her body has been replaced with mechanical parts. Very advanced technology – everything is working seamlessly with her flash, connected so closely… A living, breathing nightmare for humanity – not only she’s not human, but she’s not a flash and blood creature as well.

Was she born this way? A strange mixture of skin and metal, of muscles and mechanical parts?

Tony doesn’t think so. She must have been born without those metal parts, so expertly embedded in her body now. Was it a treatment? An… upgrade?

Either way, Tony doesn’t even want to imagine how much it had to hurt. To have all those muscles, skin, all those delicate parts of the body removed and replaced.

“Are you still bleeding?”, her voice is derived of all emotions, deeper than anyone would expect to come from such a slim frame. Tony winks taken aback for moment.

Oh, yes. He was stabbed. With his own blade. Maybe that is an explanation of why his thoughts go to such unexpected, unneeded places, when all he should be doing is planning a return to Earth. His home.

He moves for the first time since climbing into this spaceship to take a look on his hurriedly dressed wound. It’s still bleeding dozily. An emergency in another world. Here – a simple inconvenience with no real influence over his fate.

“It does,” he admits, astonished how raw and hoarse his voice sounds.

She kneels before him, her strong hands strangely delicate. There’s a first aid kit laying on the floor beside them, and when Tony became so unobservant? There’s a half-alien, half-mechanical woman touching his wounded body for god’s sake! He forces himself not to flinch. Should she wanted him dead, she would leave him on the destroyed planet, instead of practically dragging him away from the kid’s…

A quiet hiss of pain escapes his mouth and he’s back on the ship, with the alien woman who is looking at him questioningly. She’s applying a new bandage to the wound, so there’s a chance Tony won’t slowly bleed out.

“Thank you.”

She shrugs, dismissive.

“Have you flown this type of a spaceship before?”

Tony laughs hoarsely, surprising himself with the sudden sound. Is it a beginning of a panic attack? He hasn’t had one in a quite long time, but God’s know he is allowed to have one, after all that just happened. He forces himself to calm down and takes a deep breath that sends a flash of pain through his side.

“No. It’s my first time in a spaceship, apart from the Thanos’s one that we came on.”

There’s a part of her arm that is sticking out of place and Tony can’t help but wonder if it’s painful. He stands slowly, swaying lightly on his feet. Is the blood loss, lack of food and water, or general exhaustion? Probably a mix of all of those. They should take a long nap and wake up in a universe where Thanos has never snapped his fingers.

“Allow me,” he says quietly, indicating the “wound” on her arm. The looks she gives him is filled with surprise and distrust.

“I’m good at fixing,” he explains with a tired smile and somehow it convinces her to sit down and let him touch the metal arm. He’s not sure what kind of metal has been used, not without having his tools to analyze it, but is something new to him. In a different world he would love to find out everything about this new material, put it through a series of tests of various kind. Right here, right now, he only notices that this kind of damage is bound to be painful, and yet his companion shows no sings of suffering.

“Is there any tool kit onboard?”, he asks.

“You want to fix it.”, her voice is filled with consternation. She didn’t display any emotions when most of their small group has disappeared in matter of seconds, and yet now, when he’s trying to repay kindness with kindness, her walls crumble.

“I am a Mechanic,”, he shrugs. He doesn’t say how much he needs to do something, fix just one thing during this forsaken by all gods day. Somehow it feels like she knows he means even so.

“Let me check our route first,” she answers finally, all emotions gone from her face already. Tony follows her and stops, seeing the black emptiness of cosmos stretching out in front of him. All that happened, from the first noise announcing incoming troubles to the moment when his world collapsed, he didn’t have time to think about this terrifying emptiness that is still hunting his dreams.

He takes a deep breath, trying to refocus on the matter in hand. Baby steps. That’s the only thing that can stop him from descending into madness. He forces himself to look at the woman, who is checking a small monitor, apparently showing the planned route to… To what? Her home planet? She doesn’t seem like there was a single place in the whole galaxy that she could call her home.

“Where we are going?”, he asks, his pulse raising.

“Earth.”, her answer is short and clipped. “Thanos had to go there for the last missing Eternity Stone. If we are to find him…” she pauses for a moment here but continues without showing any doubt that Tony is now feeling. “We need help. We need tracks that we could follow.”

“Do you believe that you can kill him?”, Tony cannot imagine that. They did try, after all.

“Yes.”

They don’t continue their conversation after that. Tony gets the toolkit, sighs internally at the state of it, and makes the woman sit down still.

He’s sure that every single touch is painful for her, even though she doesn’t show it in a slightest way. He tries to be as gentle as it is possible when you are dealing with partially destroyed, partially broken metal piece, and your toolkit includes only very basic tools. For god’s sake, who needs a hammer on a spaceship….

It takes more than an hour of Tony cursing, apologizing and discovering absolutely mind-blowing things about mechanics of her companion’s body. She suffers through it absolutely quiet, as if it wasn’t her arm that Tony was tinkering with. It’s unnerving, to be honest. She might as well be a robot, when she sits so still. Tony wonders vaguely if she can switch herself off, her eyes seemingly distant and unseeing. Only the gentlest twitch of her body tells him her consciousness is still here.

The damage is worse than it looked at first sight, some of the wires had to take their toll already, in some previous battles. It’s not easy to get them fixed with tools at hand but Tony will not accept defeat. He will win at least one time today.

He cuts his finger on a sharp part and hisses quietly. The redness of blood it is out of place on the silvery metal of her arm. It draws her attention, her eyes finally moving to take a look on it.

Did she used to bleed like this from this arm?

When he’s finally finished, she stretches it and flexes her fingers, a shade of emotion on her face.

“it’s good,” she says in a way of “thank you” and goes to the pilot’s seat, monitoring the spaceship’s steady flight.

“Can we make it?”, Tony isn’t sure where in the galaxy they are now. Space was never his favorite subject in the world. He did study the possibility of another alien invasion but did not expect to end up locked in a spaceship, god knows where in the huge galaxy. To be honest, he wanted to make sure for that never to happen but apparently fate had different plans.

The woman doesn’t respond, busy with checking level of oxygen, or at least that’s what Tony thinks it is. It doesn’t look promising. She flips some switches and frowns, and Tony knows right this moment that fate has won his battle against “never end up dying in space”.

“We can’t, can we?”, he sits next to her in the second’s pilot seat, his heart bumping way to hard in his chest. It’s almost painful, like a beginning of a heart attack. Might be an easy way out, all things considered.

When she finally turns to him both her eyes look like a dead man’s stare.

“With that oxygen level we have a week. At most, and only if we drop the oxygen percentage to 16%. I am sending the distress signal.”, she takes a look at him and for a moment Tony wants to ask why she dragged him away from the ashes. Why bother doing such a meaningless thing, especially when you have a better chance of surviving if you go alone. One week with only one person aboard could turn into two weeks. A lot can happen during one week.

Half of the universe population was erased within seconds, after all.

Which must be exactly the reason he wasn’t left alone to die on the already dead planet. Even the biggest psychopath would rather have a company in a scenario like this, and Tony cannot help but think that the blue assassin is hiding suffering that would put him in a comatose state, locked for the rest of his life in an asylum.

He reaches out with his hand. “Tony,” he offers. “Tony Stark.”

She blinks, a momentary surprise in her eyes, and then accepts the outstretched hand.

“Nebula."

 

 

 


End file.
